Venn Diagram in Analysis Workspace

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If you are an Adobe Analytics customer, you have probably noticed that they have been tearing it up lately when it comes to Analysis Workspace. There has been a lot of cool innovations and fun stuff for you to play around with in this new freeform interface. Being an “old fogey” myself, sometimes it takes me a while to play around with the new stuff, but I have started doing that lately and found it to be interesting. In this post, I will demonstrate how you can use the new Venn Diagram visualization to do analysis.

Venn Diagram Visualization

If you are in the analytics space, you probably already know what a Venn Diagram is, but just to be sure, it is a data visualization that allows you to see how much of an overlap there is between data elements. In Analysis Workspace, Adobe allows you to add up to three Segments to the Venn Diagram and then choose a metric for which you want to see the intersection. To illustrate this, let’s look at an example. Let’s say that I want to see what percent of visitors to the Analytics Demystified blog view my blog posts and I also want to see how often my competitors are reading my blog posts. The first part is relatively easy, since I can build a segment to see which visitors view at least one of my blog posts. The latter requires me to use a tool like DemandBase to identify the companies hitting my blog and then SAINT Classifications to pick out companies that I think might be competitors of mine (or at least offer similar services to mine).

Once I have these segments built, I can go to Analysis Workspace and add the Venn Diagram visualization to the canvas and add my segments and the desired metric:

Once this is done and I click the “Build” button, I will see the Venn Diagram like this:

Here I can see that I have 26,000 unique visitors that have viewed my blog and about 4,000 competitors who viewed our website. But if I want to see the intersection of these, I can hover over the overlapping area and see this:

Now I can see that there are about 1,300 visitors (~5%) who have read my blog and are competitors. I can also click the “Manage Data Source” area to see a tabular view of this data if desired:

Next, I might want to do more research on the intersection of these two segments. To do this, I simply right-click on the overlapping area and create a brand new segment from the Venn Diagram overlap:

This will take me to the segment builder, where the segment is already pre-populated and I can make any tweaks necessary and provide a name:

Now that I have a brand new segment, I can use it like I would any other segment anywhere within Adobe Analytics. In this case, if I want to see the specific list of competitors reading my blog, I can add a new freeform table and add the DemandBase Company eVar, the Visitors metric and then apply this new segment to see the top competitors viewing my blog:

Of course, I can use the unlimited breakdown feature of Analysis Workspace to drill down as much as I want. For example, I can see exactly which blog posts a particular company is viewing, I can break that down by the Blog Post eVar and maybe even again by the Cities report:

As if that weren’t cool enough, I can also apply additional segments to the entire workspace canvas and those segments will be applied to ALL elements on the workspace canvas. For example, I noticed in the table above that a lot of competitors reading my blog appear to be from overseas. If I want to limit all of this data to companies hitting my blog from the US only, I can create a US Only segment and apply that to the entire canvas by dropping it into the segment area at the top of the page:

This will limit all of the canvas visualizations to US Only data and all of the tables and Venn Diagram will instantly update!

As you can see, the Venn Diagram visualization can be very powerful. Instead of creating hundreds of segments to identify interesting intersections, you can simply add them to the Venn Diagram visualization and then when you find the ones you like, create the segments right from there. These segments can contain visitors who viewed products from Category A and Category B or visitors who viewed a video and purchased. The possibilities are truly endless. I recommend that you pick some of your favorite segments and try it out. I think you will have a much fun as I have had seeing the intersections of your data.

3 Comments

David GatdulaAugust 17th, 2016

Great post, Adam. I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with the Venn Diagram visualization for the last couple weeks, and the quick-segment creator for the intersecting data is really a great feature. Now I just need to clean up my segment manager… So many new segments!

Hi Adam, I am having issues trying to understand what the cross over is between customers who shop on multiple devices. I was hoping I could show this through a Venn however I am having trouble with this. Any tips?

Adam Greco is a longstanding member of the web analytics community who has consulted with hundreds of clients across every industry vertical. Adam has managed the Adobe Analytics programs at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Salesforce.com. As one of the founders of the Omniture (now Adobe) Consulting group, Adam managed accounts large and small and helped clients maximize their use of Adobe Analytics technologies directly and indirectly through his extensive blogging. In 2012, in partnership with Adobe, Adam published the first-ever book on Adobe Analytics – The Adobe SiteCatalyst Handbook: An Insider’s Guide. In 2015, Adam was elected to the board of directors of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) where he now serves as Treasurer.
As an employee of Analytics Demystified Adam is a member of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA), an Adobe Business Partner, and a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Adam is also a Board Advisor at the Digital Analytics Association (DAA), Snowplow Analytics, ISDI Digital University, Claravine, Beringer Capital and Decibel Insight.